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      ‘The Curse’ Season 1, Episode 9 Recap: ‘All in’

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      “Green Queen” gets an awkward early screening as Whitney tries to broach her feelings with Asher.Season 1, Episode 9: ‘Young Hearts’It’s amazing what a reality television edit can do. Throughout “The Curse,” we’ve been exposed to what Asher and Whitney look like acting for the cameras, but we have rarely seen what they are like when they are actually on camera, once they’ve gotten the glossy treatment that the Property Brothers and other hosts have before them.The truth is: Whitney might seem painfully fake in her daily interactions, but she performs very well. She’s a natural, and watching a cut of the newly retitled “Green Queen,” it’s easy to understand why the network is so high on her. All of that falsity fades away under the bright lights, which crave that sort of manicured behavior. She fits into her role perfectly.This week’s episode, is revelatory with regards to Whitney on multiple levels, and it’s also a tour de force for Emma Stone, an actress whose natural understanding of the camera and what it can do allows her to play all the facets of this complicated, troubled character. The episode leaves no doubt about just how wrong she and Asher are for each other. But before then, a series of smaller Whitney-related events peel back layers of her carefully constructed persona.Why did Whitney marry Asher? The question has plagued this series. Their relationship is so lacking in any affection that doesn’t feel forced, you have to rack your brain to imagine a time when they were truly in love. Here, we get clarity on some of her potential reasoning. Asher’s infatuation with Whitney provided her with an escape hatch. She could take his name to get away from her old life as a lackey for her parents. After learning that a relative of one of the show’s drivers was evicted from a building run by her parents, she Googles herself under her old name, “Whitney Rhodes.” There’s a photo of her smiling at the opening of the complex, complicit in all of their misdeeds.Asher was a way to disassociate from her parents on paper — even if she’s still using their money to fund her ventures. She’s no longer “Whitney Rhodes”; She’s “Whitney Siegel,” who wears a Star of David around her neck to further distance herself from her past — no matter how merely symbolic that piece of jewelry is.Maybe at one point the intensity of Asher’s affection was appealing to Whitney, who saw something almost exotic in his Judaism. Now, however, she can’t stand him. And what’s worse: Now they have to perform for a representative from HGTV, Martha, stopped by to check up on the show’s progress. When Dougie, parroting what he has heard from the network, explains that the story line about the dissolution of their marriage isn’t going to work, Whitney starts to cozy up to Asher again. And she yet can’t help but feel enraged by his little touches. Asher challenges her to say that she loves him. She refuses, though she will go bowling, clearly a favorite pastime of his, to make amends.During their outing, there is a moment of what appears to be genuine joy between the two of them, but the spell is quickly broken when Asher’s friend Bill from the casino approaches. Bill wants to apologize. He thought that Asher was the leaker, but says he was mistaken. Asher, thinking he is impressing Whitney, confesses to being the “whistle-blower.” Later that night, she hears him quietly speaking to himself, perhaps masturbating, proudly bragging about this achievement. But then the fantasy morphs into imagining himself watching Bill having sex with Whitney. You can see the disgust grow on her face.He approaches her while she’s furiously rowing on an erg machine about new language in the contract that suggests he might be “exposed to ridicule, humiliation or condemnation.” Then an idea seems to dawn on her: She’ll show him everything, including the confessional where she spills her feelings about their relationship. Maybe if he sees it, he’ll listen to her and understand. So she and Asher and join Dougie in his hotel room, sitting awkwardly in the bed, to view an early cut of “Green Queen.”A strange thing is that after everything we’ve been privy to, “Green Queen” is still pretty compelling television. Dougie knows what he’s doing, and you can see why HGTV would be interested in the material. Here’s a very pretty person — Whitney — vowing to do good, and, as filmed by Dougie, she seems smart and capable. Asher, meanwhile, just seems at first like a goofy nuisance, making nonsensical jokes about Arnold Palmers. It’s bizarrely charming.Dougie is willing to skip over the material that really goes for Asher’s jugular — the network doesn’t want to use it anyway — but Whitney wants Asher to see just what she has done to him. Stone’s face is solemn. All of Whitney’s eager-to-please brattiness has been sapped from it as she watches with grim anticipation. It’s brutal to behold. Onscreen, Whitney appears earnest as her minor complaints about Asher morph into genuine concerns about her relationship. The problem is his worship of her.She wonders: “Can someone love you so much that the real version of you completely ceases to exist?” It’s a funny question coming from Whitney, who doesn’t really seem to have a great sense of self to begin with.And yet it’s possible, thanks to the manufactured quality of reality TV, to empathize with Whitney, maybe for the very first time. On one level we know what we’re seeing is at times fake — for instance, the shots of her laughing at the art collector’s party, where we know she had an uncomfortable time. Still, Stone sells the oppressiveness of Asher’s love for her and how stifling that can be. So it’s almost a relief when Asher storms out of the room. He got it, you think.But then he returns, his fervor renewed. He has manic energy as he closes in on her face, telling her she was right. “I’m a terrible person,” he spits. “There’s not some curse. I’m the problem.”Whitney is shocked. Instead of repelling him, she has succeeded in making him cling to her even tighter. “I’m all in on Whitney,” he says.It sounds like a threat. She starts to cry, tears he reads as an emotional outpouring. But there is terror in her eyes.Notes From EspañolaThe episode begins with an eerie sequence from the point of view of an unknown driver who waits for Whitney to leave her home and then drives all the way to the shopping plaza. Who is that?I had to put on closed captioning during the scene where Asher is talking to himself to understand what he was saying, so if you didn’t catch that at first, that’s not on you.Whitney’s discovery that Cara is her masseuse is exquisitely awkward, but does the fact that she eventually decides to walk away from the appointment show some growth? Or does her overtipping as a way of assuaging her guilt undo all that?The way in which Stone flinches just a little bit every time Fielder touches her is brilliant.Fielder’s enthusiastic bowling is almost as unnerving as his enthusiastic rapping last week. Almost.I can’t get over the ick factor of the shot of Whitney’s father trapping a roach in the apartment where he apparently is now forced to live. Her folks might be the scummiest people on this show.We’re in the homestretch, and I truly have no idea how any of this is going to resolve. That’s a good thing, but also I’m so scared. More

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      A Reinvented ‘True Detective’ Plays It Cool

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      There were times, a year ago, in Iceland, on a glacier, in the dark, in temperatures well below freezing, when Issa López thought to herself: “Who wrote this? What is wrong with this person?” López, the showrunner and director of Season 4 of the HBO anthology series “True Detective,” had only herself to blame.This shivery “True Detective,” subtitled “Night Country,” premieres on Jan. 14. Set in Ennis, a fictional town in northwest Alaska, it stars Jodie Foster as the chief of police and Kali Reis as an intimidating state trooper. Opening just as the area descends into months of unrelieved darkness, the six-episode season has an icy milieu and a female gaze forcefully distinct from the show’s past outings.Created by Nic Pizzolatto, “True Detective” debuted nearly a decade ago as a bayou noir starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Sultry, macho and spanning two timelines set 17 years apart, it entwined a familiar serial killer investigation with sweaty philosophy and intimations of the supernatural. Though that first season had its critics, it made for essential, much debated viewing. The second season, set in an unglamorous Southern California exurb and starring Colin Farrell, Taylor Kitsch, Rachel McAdams and Vince Vaughn, made a smaller, grimmer splash, as did the third season, which starred Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff and relocated the action to the Ozarks.That third season, which premiered in January 2019, attracted significantly fewer viewers. That might have meant the end of “True Detective.” But HBO believed the franchise could continue. The network began to search for a new showrunner for Season 4, preferably a woman of color. (Earlier seasons skewed overwhelmingly male and largely white, in front of the camera and behind it.) Among the potential candidates was López, a Mexican filmmaker who had written and directed a roster of Spanish-language features, including “Tigers Are Not Afraid,” a movie about missing and murdered women and children that mingled crime, fantasy and horror.Foster was drawn in by the original script but asked that her character, a somewhat blinkered white woman, be aged up and that the story’s center to be ceded to Reis’s.Michele K. Short/HBOThat film impressed Francesca Orsi, HBO’s head of drama. The essence of “True Detective,” Orsi said by phone in a recent interview, “is the way in which the horror genre is encapsulated within the detective noir narrative.” Confident that López could accomplish this, Orsi invited her to pitch a new season.López had spent nearly two decades pitching American networks and studios. She understood that network interest was no guarantee that a project would be made. And she knew that when it came to English-language work, she would be considered a risk, untried. So she decided there was no harm in dreaming big. And dark. And cold.“You write the impossible,” López said during a video call last month. “You write what you want to see.”Though López grew up in more temperate climates, she is a fan of the John Carpenter horror movie “The Thing,” set in Antarctica, and of the Alaskan vampire comic “30 Days of Night.” Assuming the project would never be greenlighted, she wrote what she wanted to see: an “existential whodunit,” as she put it, set in Alaska’s furthest, iciest reaches. To her surprise and mild dismay, HBO said yes.“It was so much fun to dream that world,” López said. “Except then I had to go there and shoot it.”López decided there was no harm in dreaming big when she pitched HBO her idea for the new season of “True Detective.” “You write the impossible,” she said. “You write what you want to see.”This season — the first without Pizzolatto, though he retains an executive producer credit — can be seen as a photo negative of the first. It is chilly rather than steamy, shadowed rather than sunlit, tundra-dry instead of humid. Despite occasional flashbacks, it restricts itself to a single timeline. In the first season, women appeared mostly as beleaguered wives or prostitutes. Here the gaze and the detectives are defiantly female.Is this still “True Detective”? While Pizzolatto was not available for comment, López argues that it is. This season retains what she sees as the series’s essentials: two detectives, shrouded in secrets and enmeshed in a landscape that holds secrets of its own. The series, she believes, favors a kind of expressionism in which the inner lives of the characters explode into the environment.“The darkness around them comes from inside of them,” she said. That’s certainly true of this season, though the earth’s axis may want to have a word. And if López exchanges the first season’s meditation on male toxicity and identity for a consideration of female victimhood and agency, she also returns the series to its roots in cosmic horror, even calling back to the certain Season 1 symbols, like the spiral.Orsi sometimes doubted the wisdom of having handed a marquee franchise to someone with little television experience, but López’s choices and attitude reassured her. “Every step of the way, I was taken aback by how confident she consistently was about what we were asking of her,” Orsi said.That confidence also inspired Foster, who hadn’t done substantive television work since her breakthrough role in the 1976 film “Taxi Driver.”“I read the script and I was like, this is beautiful,” Foster, sitting beside López, said. “There was so much that I was curious about and that I wanted to learn from. Then I met Issa and that really nailed it. I could tell that she had a collaborative spirit.”Before this new season of “True Detective,” Foster hadn’t done substantive television work since her breakthrough role in “Taxi Driver.” “I read the script and I was like, this is beautiful,” she said.The initial episode finds Foster’s Liz Danvers called into investigate the sudden disappearance of the employees of an Arctic research station. (These men are later found naked and frozen into a single block of human ice. Call it a cold case.) The mystery reunites her with Reis’s Evangeline Navarro. Former colleagues, they fell out years ago, in the wake of a gruesome domestic violence case.In the initial drafts, López wrote Navarro as Latina. But after researching the region, López decided that the character should have Native ancestry, specifically Iñupiaq. Foster asked for other changes. She felt that Danvers, a somewhat blinkered white woman whom she nicknamed “Alaska Karen,” should be aged up and that she should cede the story’s center to Navarro.Previous iterations of “True Detective” had depended on at least two major stars. Reis, a former professional boxer who made her acting debut two years ago in the revenge drama “Catch the Fair One,” is a relative newcomer. But no one mistrusted that she could shoulder a series, even as she differs in meaningful ways from Navarro.Reis, who was born and raised in Rhode Island, is of Wampanoag and Cape Verdean descent; Navarro is Iñupiaq and Dominican American. Reis’s language is not Navarro’s language, her ceremonies not the character’s. But they share a single-mindedness, a sense of duty and purpose. So Reis threw herself into research. “I just really want to make sure that I represented Alaska Natives, Iñupiaq people,” said Reis, who sat beside Foster and López in last month’s video interview. (They were all dressed in polite neutrals, though Reis had accessorized her outfit with a fierce-looking choker.) “I didn’t grow up seeing my face on the screen. I wanted to make sure that they could look on the screen and see themselves.”Reis, who is of Wampanoag and Cape Verdean descent, threw herself into researching the cultural background of her character, who is Iñupiaq and Dominican American.Though Navarro is deeply intuitive and alive to the supernatural, Reis was determined that she present as a modern woman and an effective officer, avoiding cliché. “She’s not going to be the token Native,” Reis said.To further that, she met with various Iñupiaq women, as well as several Native state troopers. She quizzed them, respectfully, on what they ate, what they wore, what slang they used. She asked the troopers how they squared their responsibilities to their community with their duties as law enforcement officers.Informed by these conversations, she, Foster and López set about creating what the earlier seasons of “True Detective” hadn’t made space for: women who are as changeable, difficult and complicated as the men.“We’re not really used to seeing women like that,” Foster said.López had done her own research, some online, scouring YouTube and Instagram for videos, some on a visit to Alaska, where she sat with Inuit men and women, ate the caribou and seal they hunted, went snowmobiling with them on the frozen seas. At a local grocery store, she noted the ruinous price of Oreo cookies. That went into the script, too. With the help of Barry Jenkins, an executive producer, the production also brought on Cathy Tagnak Rexford, a native Alaskan who is partly of Iñupiaq descent and Princess Daazhraii Johnson, who identifies as Neets’aii Gwich’in, as producers. As López told it, Rexford and Johnson asked for more scenes of food-making, of laughter, of community. (They could not be reached for comment.)As Alaska lacked the infrastructure to support a six-month shoot, the production had to make do with an area outside of Reykjavik and some computer-generated caribou and polar bears. The shoot was, Foster said, an intimate experience, with the dark and the frigid mitigated by the camaraderie and the beauty of the Northern Lights.Perhaps that beauty softened some of the script’s elements. There is no shortage of existential horror (body horror, too — missing eyeballs, a severed tongue), but the show entertains the possibility of justice and the notion, not entirely foreign to the “True Detective” franchise, that if other people are the source of most suffering, they can also provide comfort.All these months later, cozy on a sofa with her colleagues, López can look back on the experience warmly. “I learned to love the ice and the cold air, and now I miss it,” she said. “I would love to go back there for a vacation. Never to shoot again, though.” More

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      ‘Reacher’: Women Want What He’s Got, and Not Just the Beefcake

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      The hit Amazon series about a bone-crushing crime fighter isn’t only Dad TV. Women dream of having the character’s freedom and abilities, too.You may have felt the tremor: A jacked-up beast of a guy has wandered into TV Land, and his name is Reacher. Season 1 of the Amazon series that bears his name was a monster hit when it dropped in early 2022, and Season 2, which concludes on Jan. 19, appears to be even bigger, becoming Prime Video’s No. 1 title globally on its debut weekend. And the series is crushing it critically the way Reacher crushes a villain’s skull. As of early January, the new season had a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with an 84 percent audience score — when do critics ever rate a brawny action show higher than the audience?Everybody loves this “Reacher.”And by everybody, the reviews seem to suggest, that mostly means every man.A review in Paste Magazine offered this pithy summation: “I’m not saying it’s only for dudes, but I think we’re in safe territory saying it’s mostly for dudes.” And what dudes appear to like is minimal emoting and maximal fisticuffs, delivered by a mountain of muscle — a former Army investigator turned peripatetic crime-solver, who doesn’t waste time wringing his enormous, meaty hands over petty details like having a fixed abode or even a change of clothes.But here’s the thing about “Reacher”: Women watch it, too. Sure, 58 percent of the viewers for Season 1 were male, according to Nielsen. Still, that leaves a rather large number of people who are not. Common wisdom when it comes to Jack Reacher’s popularity is that men want to be him and women want to be with him. But I’ll venture that some women want to be him, too. Or at least, they want some of his freedom.Hatched by the writer Lee Child, Jack Reacher has anchored, since 1997, a series of best-selling novels that have long had a strong female readership — estimated in 2018 by their publisher, Penguin Random House, at around 60 percent. One of their biggest mainstream champions is a woman, the New York Times critic Janet Maslin. I have read about 20 of those novels, mostly in their natural habitats (flights, vacation rentals), and I’m proud to share a fandom with the British writer Antonia Fraser, who in a letter to The Guardian in 2022, wrote, “The thought that there is a new Jack Reacher to read in the evening makes the whole day whiz by happily.”Female readership of the the Reacher novels, started by Lee Child, have been estimated at 60 percent. The first debuted in 1997.The most recent book was written with Child’s brother, Andrew.Now, the Amazon show, starring Alan Ritchson, finally offers a worthy screen adaptation. This is happy news after the two movies from the 2010s, which were derided for casting Tom Cruise as a guy described in one book as having “a six-pack like a cobbled city street, and a chest like a suit of N.F.L. armor, and biceps like basketballs, and subcutaneous fat like a Kleenex tissue.” Not only does Ritchson fit the physical requirements — which are so crucial to the character’s essence that they are not negotiable — but he also has a way with deadpan humor and is as light on his feet as a human the size of an industrial refrigerator can be.Reacher appeals to men in general and fathers in particular because, as the TV critic Eric Deggans of NPR writes, he is “a character freed from all the pressures and responsibilities many dads face every day” — a fairly representative critical assessment, based on the many reviews I’ve read. “He has no wife, steady romantic partner, kids or family,” Deggans continues, “not even a mortgage, rent payment or full-time job.”But I suspect that plenty of moms would welcome the opportunity to be freed from those demands as well. (And they are more likely than dads to be guilt-tripped for even entertaining the fantasy.) Reacher, who travels the country with nothing but a toothbrush, an A.T.M. card and the clothes on his back, does not have any responsibilities other than the ones he sets for himself. I’m not a mother, but I do have a spouse, a deskbound job and bills to pay, and I often find myself thinking, “I’ll have what he’s having.”Some fans were disappointed by the casting of Tom Cruise in two Reacher movie adaptations, given the importance of the character’s size in the books.Karen Ballard/Paramount Pictures and Skydance ProductionsIn the series, as in the books, Reacher (Ritchson, left, with Shaun Sipos and Serinda Swan) must collaborate with other people, forcing him to act more like a human. Brooke Palmer/Amazon Prime VideoConsider the benefits: When Reacher needs a change of clothing, he simply buys something cheap wherever he happens to be. (Miraculously, he always finds his size, which appears to be InfinityXL, in local thrift or surplus stores.) In this season’s first episode, he spends $22 on a new outfit. Effortlessly landing a complete get-up on a two-figure budget is living the dream.His diet is straightforward, too. For breakfast, it is always bacon and eggs. Otherwise, it’s a cheeseburger and fries, and he always scarfs down everything with great relish. Forgive me for thinking this sounds more satisfying, if only for a day, than picking at a “girl dinner” — especially since his eating habits miraculously translate to muscle instead of fat.Maybe the single most enviable thing about Reacher from a woman’s perspective, though, is that he is never afraid. Dark alleyways and menacing strangers don’t faze him, and what woman does not envy that confidence? Often while silently, powerlessly stewing as some jerk harasses a woman in public, I have fantasized about walking up to him and, with just one withering stare, reducing him to a quaking puddle of fear.Reacher can do that. And if that’s not enough, he can punch him into oblivion. For some of us, the transference is real.It is undeniable that Reacher can come close to being a lone sociopath (though he tends to return rather than initiate violence, or at least to strike preemptively). But Child has cannily ensured that while Reacher wanders alone, he rarely operates alone, forcing his hero to act like a human and giving women other vicarious means to connect with him. Season 2 is very much a team story, as Reacher reconvenes with members of his army investigations unit, including Frances Neagley (Maria Sten). Her phobia about being touched might be one reason her relationship with Reacher is successfully platonic; they have the kind of committed friendship you rarely see women have with straight men in books or onscreen, something I find incredibly refreshing.Reacher also is capable of being a thoughtful and attentive lover. In Season 1, he works with two local cops, played by Willa Fitzgerald and Malcolm Goodwin — you’ll have one guess which one he sleeps with. In Season 2, he and his former Army colleague Karla Dixon (Serinda Swan) consummate an attraction that was forbidden back when he was her boss. In both cases, as usual, he respectfully avoids a messy romantic entanglement, all while supplying some much-sought-after action between the sheets.This side of beef has been tenderized for brief but meaningful flings. Believe it or not, a lot of women want those, too.Because of course, there are fans who do, in fact, want to be with Reacher. Fair enough. For them, it’s worth noting that in one novel he is described as being so good in the sack that “The floor quivered. The hall door creaked and shuttered.” I’ll hazard a guess that if anything remotely resembling that scene ever makes it into a future season of “Reacher,” it might well be the rare thing that unites men and women, dads and moms, straight and gay, in a huge burst of happy laughter. More

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      What to Watch This Weekend: Catch Up on ‘The Curse’

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      The second-to-last episode of this cringe dramedy starring Emma Stone, Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie arrives this weekend. There’s still time to watch before the season finale.Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone in a scene from Episode 5 of “The Curse.”Richard Foreman Jr./A24“The Curse,” a nightmare-tinted drama about aspiring HGTV hosts, starring Nathan Fielder, Emma Stone and Benny Safdie, is approaching its finale; the show’s ninth of 10 episodes arrives this weekend: Friday on Paramount+ and Sunday at 9 p.m., on Showtime. The show’s discomfort is so intense it becomes mythical, its white awkwardness so potent that those in its blast zone question reality.The show centers on Whitney (Stone) and Asher (Fielder), a brittle couple trying to sell a show called “Fliplanthropy” under the tortured guidance of Asher’s former bully turned reality producer, Dougie (Safdie, who could repurpose both costume and demeanor to play the disgraced megachurch leader in a recent Hulu documentary). Whitney is the heiress to her parents’ slumlord fortune, a fact she pretends to distance herself from but can’t quite. Asher is her largely dutiful acolyte whose strained encounter with a Black little girl in a parking lot ends with her declaring, “I curse you.”Does your culture believe in curses, Asher asks her father, Abshir (Barkhad Abdi). No, he says. “But if you put an idea in your head, it can become very real.” That’s one of the pillars of the show, this self-imposed reality of imagination. Whitney believes people want her arty, eco-friendly “passive” houses, though no one really does. Asher starts to believe he really is cursed, the rare character to recite Shabbat prayers and also experience backyard stigmata. If you see yourself as a savior, doesn’t everyone look like someone desperate for saving?A lot of art centers on a similar idea, that perception and fate are often the same. Where “The Curse” becomes more interesting is its exploration of the inverse — that when you take an idea out of your head, it can become very surreal. The jokes Asher scripts for himself become, in performance, tortured and grotesque rather than just flat. Whitney thinks her chiropractor could help Abshir with his neck pain, and when put into action, the result is as disturbing as any horror movie. Dougie nudges Whitney to envision the show with a more cynical, Bravo-ish tone, and suddenly a disenchanted cruelty springs forth, like a summoned demon.The line between surrealism and revulsion is often thin, and on “The Curse,” that emerges most often as “recontextualizing” — which the characters themselves discuss as an artistic concept and vaguely mock. But a loss of context is what drives some of the most jarring facets of the show: A heap of poached chicken would be normal and welcome in a packaged meal kit, but sitting on the lip of a sink in a firehouse, that same chicken is terrifying and revolting; Dougie shocks Whitney with how easy it is, with reality TV editing, to turn one fleeting glance into marriage-threatening contempt; the sound of a car horn hangs on too long, until the tone melts into a panicky wail; an expensive stove is an emblem of green living, unless it’s chucked out to the curb as trash, in which case it’s a $7,000 icon of waste.Cringe comedies abound, but the cringe drama is a rarer specimen, perhaps because its discomfort just compounds; scorn does not discharge cringe the way laughter does. On “The Curse” especially, cringe is so intertwined with surveillance and recording, the paranoia that every misstep is on tape forever — which isn’t even paranoia, it’s just reality. But reality for the characters is also warped by reality TV, a phony interaction made “real” by dint of its record, and round and round it goes, every reflection distorted, every interaction a setup. More

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      30 Shows to Watch This Winter

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      This season promises a deluge of big stars (Nicole Kidman, Kate Winslet), intriguing adaptations (“Avatar: The Last Airbender”), long-awaited returns (“True Detective”) and final goodbyes (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”).Is it a delayed effect of the writers’ and actors’ strikes? The Year of the Dragon? Climate change? Whatever the reason, a paper-thin fall season on television screens (definitely a result of the strikes) is being followed by a deluge of attention-grabbing shows this winter. A-list stars (Jodie Foster, Nicole Kidman, Kate Winslet), intriguing adaptations and reboots (“3 Body Problem,” “Avatar: The Last Airbender”), long-awaited returns (welcome back, “True Detective”) and final goodbyes (so long, “Curb Your Enthusiasm”) abound. Throw in all the delayed broadcast-network premieres — your various “Chicago,” “FBI,” “NCIS” and “Law and Order” series, among others — and it promises to be exhausting.Here, based on available screeners, track record or sheer star power, are 30 of the more interesting selections, arranged in chronological order. All dates are subject to change.‘One Piece’Episode 1,089 of the 25-year-old pirate-adventure anime marks the beginning of what is being called its Final Saga, but there’s no telling how many more hundreds of episodes that might entail. (Crunchyroll, Jan. 6)‘Funny Woman’The actress (“Skins”) and writer (“Slow Horses”) Morwenna Banks adapted this six-episode drama from the Nick Hornby novel “Funny Girl.” Gemma Arterton plays a woman who leaves behind her life as a beauty queen in 1960s Blackpool, England, to move to London for a career in TV comedy. (PBS, Jan. 7)‘Miss Scarlet and the Duke’No one is currently doing the self-centered, self-righteous — but charming! — force of nature better than Kate Phillips, now in her fourth season as Eliza Scarlet, who is still struggling to succeed as a female detective in Victorian London. (PBS, Jan. 7)‘Criminal Record’Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo headline this dark London-set police thriller, while Cathy Tyson, star of the great British neo-noir “Mona Lisa,” lends gravitas as the mother of a man who may have been unjustly imprisoned. (Apple TV+, Jan. 10)‘Bluey’Your long parental nightmare is over, at least for a few hours: Everyone’s favorite family of talking Australian dogs drops 10 new episodes. (Disney+, Jan. 12)‘Belgravia: The Next Chapter’Helen Edmundson, chief writer of the quite decent British mystery “Dalgliesh,” takes over Julian Fellowes’s Georgian-Victorian, upstairs-downstairs melodrama “Belgravia.” This second season picks up several decades after the first and centers on the son who caused such consternation in the original, now grown into Lord Trenchard (Benjamin Wainwright). (MGM+, Jan. 14)Jodie Foster, left, and Kali Reis in “True Detective: Night Country,” which takes place in Alaska.Michele K. Short/HBO‘True Detective: Night Country’HBO’s horror noir returns after a five-year hiatus. Season 4 enters the arctic-derangement territory of “Fortitude,” “The Terror” and “The Thing,” as the crew of an Alaska research station collectively disappears into the 24-hour darkness. Jodie Foster plays the series’s latest angsty cop. (HBO, Jan. 14)‘Death and Other Details’Mandy Patinkin stars as the professed “world’s greatest detective” in a shipboard mystery-comedy that appears to triangulate among “Only Murders in the Building,” “White Lotus” and Hercule Poirot. (Hulu, Jan. 16)‘The Shift’The talented Danish director Lone Scherfig (“An Education”) created and is the showrunner of this hospital drama about a team of midwives whose high performance masks critical understaffing; the Danish title translates as “Day and Night.” Sofie Grabol of “The Killing” plays the chief midwife. (MHz Choice, Jan. 16)‘Sort Of’Bilal Baig’s loosely autobiographical, Toronto-set series is known for its head-on but nonchalant approach to gender and identity. It has reached a third season — in which Baig’s character, Sabi, deals with the fallout from their father’s death and their boss’s longings — because it nails the very particular texture of the Canadian dramedy: muted, expertly paced, earnestly whimsical, polished in the most nonaggressive way possible. (Max, Jan. 18)‘The Woman in the Wall’Ruth Wilson brings her layered, off-kilter intensity to this thriller involving an Irish woman who has not recovered from her encounter with one of the country’s notorious Magdalene asylums. Daryl McCormack of “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” plays a cop investigating the murder of a priest. (Paramount+, Jan. 19; Showtime, Jan. 21)‘Griselda’The life of the cocaine merchant Griselda Blanco gets the full-gloss treatment, with a striving-immigrant story line, lots of disco nostalgia and Sofia Vergara in the title role. (Netflix, Jan. 25)‘In the Know’Mike Judge and Zach Woods, who worked together on “Silicon Valley,” bring a similar strain of cerebral satire to the quirks and pretensions of public radio, except this time the unbearable egoists and patient enablers are portrayed by stop-motion puppets. Woods voices an NPR host with an undeniable physical resemblance to Ira Glass; his interview subjects are real people who appear on the animated studio’s monitors. (Peacock, Jan. 25)Brian Tee and Nicole Kidman in “Expats,” based on the Janice Y.K. Lee novel, “The Expatriates.”Prime Video‘Expats’Janice Y.K. Lee’s 2016 novel, “The Expatriates,” about the lives of high-strung Americans living in Hong Kong, comes to TV as a series directed by Lulu Wang (“The Farewell”) and starring Nicole Kidman as the perfect expat wife, Margaret, a bit of casting that feels inevitable. (Amazon Prime Video, Jan. 26)‘Hightown’This engaging beach-town crime drama — energetic but downbeat, in the general neighborhood of “Justified” — enters its third and final season with the highly problematic fisheries agent Jackie Quinones (Monica Raymund) passed out on the Cape Cod sand after her latest blackout bender. (Starz, Jan. 26)‘Masters of the Air’The producing team behind “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific” — including Gary Goetzman, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg — offers another salute to American forces in World War II, this time chronicling the crews of the 100th Bomb Group of the Army Air Force as they fly missions over Germany. Like its predecessors it has a large and not overly well-known cast, led by Austin Butler and Callum Turner. (Apple TV+, Jan. 26)‘Genius: MLK/X’The fourth edition of the “Genius” series yokes together the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and Malcolm X (Aaron Pierre), who crossed paths just once, so expect a lot of scene shifting. (National Geographic, Feb. 1)Maya Erskine and Donald Glover in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” a remake of the 2005 movie.David Lee/Prime Video‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’Determined to keep us guessing, Donald Glover, working with the writer Francesca Sloane, follows up “Atlanta” and “Swarm” with a remake of the 2005 married-spies film that starred Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Glover and Maya Erskine, as John and Jane Smith, lead a promising cast that includes John Turturro, Michaela Coel, Sarah Paulson, Paul Dano, Sharon Horgan and Parker Posey. (Amazon Prime Video, Feb. 2)‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’The most recent season of Larry David’s burlesque of Hollywood self-absorption was a pretty good argument for watching “Family Guy” at 10:30 on Sundays. But with more than two years to prepare for its 12th and final season, maybe the show can recapture some of its former glory. (HBO, Feb. 4)‘Gospel’The indefatigable historian-impresario Henry Louis Gates Jr. follows up the 2021 documentary “The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song” with a four-hour history of gospel music, directed by Stacey L. Holman and Shayla Harris. (PBS, Feb. 12)‘The New Look’Ben Mendelsohn, best known for dark crime dramas and thrillers (“Bloodline,” “The Outsider”) and for playing a shape-shifting alien in the Marvel universe, changes things up. He plays the post-World War II Christian Dior, about to revolutionize the fashion world, in a series from Todd A. Kessler, a creator of “Bloodline” and “Damages.” Juliette Binoche co-stars as Dior’s great competitor Coco Chanel. (Apple TV+, Feb. 14)‘Constellation’Attention Jonathan Banks fans: With “Better Call Saul” kaput, the peerless character actor resurfaces in this science-fiction thriller. Noomi Rapace stars as an astronaut who returns to Earth after a bad trip. (Apple TV+, Feb. 21)Gordon Cormier in “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” a live-action adaptation of the beloved animated series.Robert Falconer/Netflix‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’Netflix turns an animated hit into a live-action show, as it did with the anime “Cowboy Bebop” and “One Piece.” This time it transmutes the highly regarded American series about a young lama-like warrior fighting to bring about harmony among the nations of fire, water, earth and air. (Netflix, Feb. 22)‘The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy’“Grey’s Anatomy” meets “Rick and Morty” in an animated comedy set in an intergalactic hospital in the year 14,002; it is the first show created by Cirocco Dunlap, a writer on “Miracle Workers” and “Man Seeking Woman.” Stephanie Hsu and Keke Palmer voice the young renegade surgeons Sleech and Klak. (Amazon Prime Video, Feb. 23)‘The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live’Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes, the franchise’s original alpha, and Danai Gurira’s sword-wielding Michonne are revived in the seventh “Walking Dead” TV series. (AMC, Feb. 25)‘Shogun’You could ask whose needs are being served by making another miniseries based on James Clavell’s 1975 best seller, beyond those of whomever’s digital pocket the film rights were burning a hole in. (Michaela Clavell, the novelist’s daughter, is an executive producer.) But you can’t argue with the chance to watch excellent Japanese performers like Hiroyuki Sanada, Tadanobu Asano and Fumi Nikaido. (FX, Feb. 27)‘Elsbeth’Elsbeth Tascioni, the aggressively quirky lawyer played by Carrie Preston in “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight,” was a bit of an acquired taste. If you acquired it, Preston is now starring in a spinoff series also created by the generally reliable team of Michelle and Robert King. The premise is clever: Tascioni comes to New York to observe the police department as part of a consent decree (we’re told the other candidate was Cary Agos, the “Good Fight” lawyer played by Matt Czuchry), setting up “Elsbeth” as more of a comic procedural than a legal drama. (CBS, Feb. 29)Kate Winslet plays an autocratic ruler in “The Regime.”Miya Mizuno/HBO‘The Regime’Will Tracy, a writer for “Succession” and “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” cements his connection to HBO with this miniseries he created about the ruler of a fictional, failing Central European autocracy. Among the bonuses of that association: Kate Winslet as your star, Jessica Hobbs (“The Crown”) and Stephen Frears as your directors and Gary Shteyngart as one of your writers. Andrea Riseborough plays the chancellor’s chief minister, Hugh Grant the opposition leader and Martha Plimpton the American secretary of state. (HBO, March 3)‘Palm Royale’Kristen Wiig stars as a woman campaigning to join 1969 Palm Beach society in a cheerfully mordant comedy from the writer and producer Abe Sylvia (“George & Tammy,” “Dead to Me”) that also boasts Allison Janney, Leslie Bibb, Laura Dern and Carol Burnett. (Apple TV+, March 20)‘3 Body Problem’The producers of the blockbuster American fantasy series “Game of Thrones” adapt the blockbuster Chinese science-fiction novel “The Three-Body Problem,” in some kind of apotheosis of the nerd-tech takeover of our storytelling culture. The trailer looks cool, though. (Netflix, March 21)Other returning shows: “The Great North,” Fox, Jan. 7; “All Creatures Great and Small,” PBS, Jan. 7; “La Brea,” NBC, Jan. 9; “SkyMed,” Paramount+, Jan. 11; “The Traitors,” Peacock, Jan. 12; “Family Law,” CW, Jan. 17; “It Was Always Me,” Disney+, Jan. 17; “Chicago Fire,” “Chicago Med,” “Chicago P.D.,” NBC, Jan. 17; “Double Cross,” AllBlk, Jan. 18; “Law & Order,” “Law & Order: Organized Crime,” “Law & Order: SVU,” NBC, Jan. 18; “Real Time With Bill Maher,” HBO, Jan. 19; “The Way Home,” Hallmark, Jan. 21; “The Bachelor,” ABC, Jan. 22; “Father Brown,” BritBox, Jan. 23; “Abbott Elementary,” “The Conners,” “Not Dead Yet,” ABC, Feb. 7; “Halo,” Paramount+, Feb. 8; “Bob Hearts Abishola,” “NCIS,” “NCIS: Hawaii,” “The Neighborhood,” CBS, Feb. 12; “Ghosts,” “So Help Me Todd,” “Young Sheldon,” CBS, Feb. 15; “Blue Bloods,” “Fire Country,” CBS, Feb. 16; “Life and Beth,” Hulu, Feb. 16; “CSI: Vegas,” “The Equalizer,” CBS, Feb. 18; “The Good Doctor,” “Will Trent,” ABC, Feb. 20; “The Tourist,” Netflix, Feb. 29; “BMF,” Starz, March 1; “Alert: Missing Persons Unit,” “The Cleaning Lady,” Fox, March 5; “Animal Control,” Fox, March 6; “Grey’s Anatomy,” ABC, March 14; “Girls5Eva,” Netflix, March 14; “Call the Midwife,” PBS, March 17; “Bridgerton,” Netflix, May 16. More

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      Donald Wildmon, Early Crusader in Conservative Culture Wars, Dies at 85

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      He founded the American Family Association, which became a juggernaut in the Christian right’s campaign against sex and gay themes in art, television and pop culture.Donald E. Wildmon, a conservative activist whose alarm over indecency on television spawned a national organization, the American Family Association, a once powerful cog of the Christian right, and who led boycotts over sexuality and gay themes in some of America’s most popular TV shows and in the arts, died in Tupelo, Miss., where he lived, on Dec 28. He was 85.The cause was Lewy body dementia, according to a statement posted by the American Family Association.Mr. Wildmon’s crusades beginning in the 1970s against boundary-pushing trends in popular culture and the arts — including high-profile attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts — were an early thunderclap of the culture wars that have moved from the fringe of the Republican Party to its mainstream.A former pastor in the United Methodist Church, Mr. Wildmon became a lightning rod for liberals, who attacked him for bigotry and stifling free speech. In 1981, the president of NBC, Fred Silverman, a champion of socially conscious television, said that Mr. Wildmon’s threats to boycott advertisers were “a sneak attack on the foundation of democracy.”“A boycott,” Mr. Wildmon responded in an interview with The New York Times that year, “is as legal and as American as apple pie.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Pat McAfee Apologizes Over Role in Aaron Rodgers-Jimmy Kimmel Feud

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      Rodgers, the Jets quarterback, suggested during an appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show” that Kimmel had a connection to Jeffrey Epstein, leading Kimmel to threaten legal action.Pat McAfee on Wednesday apologized for airing comments that Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers made toward Jimmy Kimmel on McAfee’s ESPN television show a day earlier suggesting the late-night talk show host had a connection to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.“Some things obviously people get very pissed off about, especially when they’re that serious allegations,” McAfee said. “So we apologize for being a part of it. I can’t wait to hear what Aaron has to say about it. Hopefully those two will just be able to settle this, you know, not work-wise, but be able to chitchat and move along.”Speaking on his weekly Tuesday appearance on McAfee’s television show on ESPN, Rodgers, a four-time winner of the N.F.L.’s Most Valuable Player Award, suggested that Kimmel, the host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on ABC, was acquainted with Epstein, who was accused of having sex with minors and in 2019 died by suicide while in jail. Epstein was a longtime friend to powerful politicians and business executives, and the names of some of his associates are expected to be publicly released soon in court documents.“There’s a lot of people, including Jimmy Kimmel, really hoping that doesn’t come out,” Rodgers said on McAfee’s show. Kimmel denied the allegations on X, formerly known as Twitter, and threatened potential legal action against Rodgers.“Your reckless words put my family in danger,” Kimmel said. “Keep it up and we will debate the facts further in court.”ESPN and ABC are owned by Disney, placing McAfee and both entities in an uneasy situation. The predicament highlights the leeway ESPN gives McAfee, including the regular appearances by Rodgers, who has used his time on the show to speak out against vaccines and even challenged Travis Kelce to a debate during a recent appearance. In October, McAfee confirmed a report that Rodgers had been paid over $1 million to appear on the show.Spokesmen for ABC and ESPN did not immediately respond to requests for comment.ESPN signed McAfee, a former N.F.L. punter, to a reported five-year, $85 million contract last year to bring his popular digital show to the network and to appear on other programing. The hire came as ESPN underwent layoffs as part of an overall cost-cutting strategy from Disney.McAfee stands out among the network’s other personalities, often using profanity on what had long been family-friendly programming and eschewing the usual business-casual attire for tank tops. Though he has scaled back on the coarse language, ESPN has hoped his show’s freewheeling format would attract new viewers as the network’s business model changes.“We’re not putting a suit and tie on him,” Burke Magnus, ESPN’s president of content, told The Wall Street Journal in September. More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in January

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      Sofia Vergara’s narco queenpin miniseries and a crypto documentary highlight this month’s slate.Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of January’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)‘Bitconned’Now streamingThe collapse of big-time cryptocurrency exchanges like FTX grab a lot of headlines, but these are far from the only crypto businesses that have misled investors into losing fortunes. The documentary “Bitconned” tracks the rise and fall of Centra Tech, a company that promised — dubiously, in retrospect — to make crypto assets accessible via a debit card. Directed by Bryan Storkel (best-known for the quirky docs “The Pez Outlaw” and “The Bad Boy of Bowling”), the film is anchored by extensive interviews with the Centra Tech masterminds, as well as with some of the journalists who figured out early that something was fishy here. The details of the story are at once amusing and alarming, involving easily persuaded celebrity spokespeople, phony apps engineered to demonstrate a nonexistent technology and a FOMO culture where the bold promise of quick cash drowns out common sense.‘Fool Me Once’Now streamingThe author Harlan Coben’s novels are prime adaptation fodder for two simple reasons: He creates sympathetic protagonists with relatable anxieties; and he writes twisty plots that keep readers guessing. In the British miniseries “Fool Me Once,” Michelle Keegan plays a typical Coben hero, Maya Stern, an ex-military special operations agent who is shocked one day to look at the footage from her home security camera and see her husband, Joe (Richard Armitage), whom she thought had been murdered. Her investigation into this mystery leads to Maya crossing paths with a distrustful homicide investigator (Adeel Akhtar) and Joe’s rich and powerful mother (Joanna Lumley) — as well as some family members of her own who believe Joe’s strange case may be tied to the death of Maya’s sister.‘Society of the Snow’Starts streaming: Jan. 4In 1972, a plane crash in the Andes left over two dozen passengers stuck on a remote, icy mountain, with little hope of rescue and only a small amount of food to share. Famously — or infamously — the survivors resorted to cannibalism while waiting for the spring thaw. But the director J.A. Bayona (adapting a book by the journalist Pablo Vierci) doesn’t make the eating of human flesh the primary point of emphasis in his film “Society of the Snow.” He’s more interested in hardships like extreme cold and sudden avalanches, and in how a desperate situation strengthened the bond between these people, many of whom played together on the same rugby team. This is film about young men fighting hard to stay alive for each other’s sake, in a landscape at once picturesque and cruel.‘The Brothers Sun’ Season 1Starts streaming: Jan. 4The two brothers in the action-dramedy “The Brothers Sun” couldn’t be more different. One is Bruce (Sam Song Li), a cash-strapped Los Angeles college student with aspirations to be an improv comic; the other is Charles (Justin Chien), a skilled amateur chef who also happens to be a top-level assassin in a Taiwan triad. Michelle Yeoh plays the boys’ mother, Eileen, who has been sheltering Bruce from the criminal life in America. But when killers from the old country start invading her suburban sanctuary, she has to get her gangster groove back to keep her family safe. Created by Brad Falchuk (a creator of “Glee” and “American Horror Story”) and Byron Wu, this series combines dynamic martial arts sequences with scenes where the dysfunctional Suns relearn how to trust each other.‘Griselda’Starts streaming: Jan. 25Sofia Vergara plays the notorious drug lord Griselda Blanco in this miniseries, created by the writer-producer Ingrid Escajeda alongside some of the team behind the Netflix favorite “Narcos.” (Vergara, a Colombian herself, is also a producer on the project.) Blanco’s story has been told before in documentaries and TV movies, most of which treat her as a larger-than-life criminal legend. “Griselda” aims to be more grounded, following the cocaine queenpin from her origins in Medellín to her dominance of the Miami market, while frequently jumping back and forth in time to compare the mild-mannered immigrant mother that Blanco once seemed to be with the ruthless woman who went on to outfox the mob’s macho men.Also arriving:Jan. 1“You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment”Jan. 5“Gyeongseong Creature” Season 1, Part 2Jan. 10“The Trust: A Game of Greed” Season 1Jan. 11“Champion” Season 1“Detective Forst” Season 1“Sonic Prime” Season 3Jan. 12“Lift”“Love Is Blind: Sweden” Season 1Jan. 19“The Bequeathed” Season 1“Sixty Minutes”Jan. 22“Not Quite Narwhal” Season 2Jan. 23“Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees”“Love Deadline” Season 1Jan. 24“Queer Eye” Season 8“Six Nations: Full Contact”Jan. 30“Jack Whitehall: Settle Down”Jan. 31“Baby Bandito” More